Jo Liddle is an artist living on the North East coast of England. She studied Theatre & Costume Design at Wimbledon School of Art and worked in the London-based theatre and TV industries before re-training as a teacher. After retiring back to the NE, Jo set up a studio to develop her own practice. Jo’s work encompasses a range of materials and processes; often painting, but also photography, print, mixed-media and video/sound collages. Her experience in theatre is apparent in her dramatic colour palette and a strong sense of scene and narrative.

Jo is inspired by personal histories and memories which can be fleeting and difficult to grasp. She usually works with a layered technique that reflects the passing of time, using, for example, layered sound and video images cut from old cine films, or the physical materiality of oil paint to give presence to these ephemeral ideas by building up the paint in layers and rubbing away, or in a video by fading out, to reveal and simultaneously hide the images, the memory. Some areas are worked up in more detail, as a more sharply remembered part of the memory, some fade into the background, some are lost forever; as in art, so in life. The film or canvas itself becomes a palimpsest, holding a trace of previous images and in this way, reflects the fragmented process of memory retrieval.

Jo has exhibited as part of group exhibitions around the North East and Midlands, including with Blur and ByA collectives in Sunderland, Newcastle Late Shows, Gas Contemporary, Gallagher &Turner and Fronteer & Cupola Galleries in Sheffield. She belongs to NANE (Network Artists North East). She continues to teach online through WEA.